Wealth & Money Quote by Robert C. Solomon

Solomon’s sentence performs a neat rhetorical dodge: he reaches for the sharpest word for American power, “hegemony,” then recoils from it mid-thought. That recoil isn’t accidental. It signals a moral discomfort with naming dominance as dominance, even while admitting “influence around the world” as a lived fact. The line is doing reputational triage on behalf of a country and, in a subtler way, on behalf of the speaker: I’m not endorsing empire, I’m describing reality.

Then comes the real argument: U.S. influence, he suggests, isn’t meaningfully grounded in the dollar’s reserve-currency role. Subtext: critics who frame American power as a monetary scam, a kind of global seigniorage racket, are overstating the case. Solomon wants to relocate the source of influence from finance to something fuzzier and more defensible - institutions, alliances, cultural pull, military capacity, the gravitational force of markets. It’s a pushback against a clean, materialist story in which currency status explains everything.

Context matters here. In late-20th-century debates about globalization, the “dollar system” became a shorthand for U.S. dominance. Solomon, as an educator (and known publicly more as a moral philosopher than a geopolitical tactician), sounds like someone insisting that power doesn’t reduce neatly to a balance-sheet variable. That insistence doubles as a critique of technocratic cynicism: if you treat reserve currency as the master key, you let harder questions off the hook - questions about consent, coercion, and the narratives that make “influence” feel like leadership rather than control.